Sure it's easy to rate the playing song on your iPod, but what if you want to rate tunes as they play in iTunes on your Mac? Normally you'd have to click on the iTunes window and make sure the song that's currently playing is highlighted, then pull down a menu or click in the window to apply a star rating to the tune. Then you'd have to return to looking at porn or whatever it was you were doing before the interruption.

Star is much better. It puts a little star in your menu bar that works even if iTunes is in the background behind a picture of Paris Hilton. Pull down the star menu and it shows you the title of the currently playing tune, the current star rating of that tune, and allows you to change the star rating by simply selecting from the various rows of stars in the same menu. Slick, simple, elegant and stable.

I'm currently going through the 710 perfectly legal free MP3s I downloaded via the (South by Southwest) SXSW 2006 Showcasing Artist bittorrent download file. That's a lot of listening and rating.

Star is a great little free helper. Thanks dudes, for thinking of folks like me.